You want people to be impressed. You want them to think you are the cat’s meow. But how do you build a reputation online without sounding, you boastful? Stuart McHenry shares 12 creative ideas with us.

1) Let your customers brag for you! Some of the best companies in the world encourage their customers to post reviews of their products or services online. Nothing can hold a candle to other people that brag for you.

2) Do your friends use your service or products? Ask them to say some nice things for you. If you cannot get your friends to help you brag then you really stink at bragging.

Pro Tip: Once you get your friends to brag hire a reputation management company to bubble up the results to be more visible online.

3) Use Twitter for interactions and as a reference. Did you just solve a major issue for a company you work with? Look for people having similar problems and tweet them a solution.

Example: @smindsrt I had a similar issue but used “XYZ” to solve the issue. You can read more about it here:

4) Blog to Brag. A great blog post will include experiences to back up your story. Have you worked with some of the biggest companies in the world? Blog about it and be sure to include how you helped them. A personal or corporate blog is a great vehicle to communicate your credentials and accomplishments.

5) Get Interviewed. Most interviews have a small biography section in the beginning. Provide some bragging points in the form of a biography but make sure it’s written in first person so it looks like it’s coming from the interviewer.

6) Linkedin is an overlooked place to share business information. Within linkedin there are several areas you could post information about your business for others to see. The best way is to join a group and get active. There are always lots of questions posted and you can easily insert your brag within a helpful reply. Ie. When we helped “XYZ” company with a similar problem this is what we did.

7) Hire someone to brag for you. This might sounds extreme but you’d be surprised how often this is done. Whether it’s someone from Fiverr or a top notch social media consultant others are generally your best bet to help get your credentials out there.

8) Blog Comment Marketing can be very effective when done right. I’m not saying to run out and spam a bunch of blogs because that would be just wrong. Rather leave helpful comments on related blogs where you can contribute and become a part of the community. Again, others can help spread your credentials here as well.

9) Forums can be really good places to help you brag. I remember when Jeremy Shoemaker was a nobody and he posted a helpful post on a webmaster forum about his earnings. He also mentioned some tips on how others could do the same. This got the ball rolling on his popularity and basically a few forum posts helped him boost his business.

10) Public speaking is an excellent way to brag for your business. Get in front of an audience at an event and tell them why you are there. What accomplishments have you or your company accomplished. The great thing about speaking is there are usually people that tweet, blog and share your information online.

11) Writing articles is a simple way to get your bragging across. When you’re writing the article you can use accomplishments as a case study. This way you get your points across with some facts but more importantly you get to get your brag out.

12) Use your website slogan to help you brag. Are you the number one domain register in the world? Add it to your tag line or company slogan. Everyone that sees your logo will read it and this is great for brand building too.

Guest blogger Stuart McHenry is the President of McKremie.com an Internet Marketing company that also focuses on online reputation management.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 29th, 2012 at 7:21 am and is filed under reputation management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

4 Responses to “12 clever ways to brag without “bragging” online”

Great post. I think it can be difficult for some people to big themselves up – and those that don’t find it difficult are often over the top. You have some good suggestions to get around it from both angles. Thanks for sharing on Bizsugar.com

Interesting stuff. I wouldn’t have viewed public speaking as a “brag” moment, but I then had to think about what I’ve heard Tony Robbins does in his live seminars, which is his way of promoting to get people to go to more of them. That’s a lesson I probably need to learn better.

Hi David,
Thanks for the informative and funny post. I find writing, blogging, even commenting to be fairly difficult because as you say, it demands knowledge and something tangible to back it up with or reference to.
You’ve enlightened me with some great points!